10. Truth, Mystery, and Darkness
10
Truth, Mystery, and Darkness
On the Limits of Human Understanding
My theme in this sermon is “truth.” In January 1697, the great English philosopher John Locke wrote to one of his closest friends explaining the delight he experienced in the pursuit of truth: “I know there is truth opposite to falsehood, that it may be found if people will, and is worth the seeking, and is not only the most valuable, but the pleasantest thing in the world.” Those words seem to me to be both an inspiration and a challenge. They could easily serve as the motto for the intellectual aspirations of the natural sciences, philosophy, and Christian theology.
However, Locke was also acutely aware of the limited capacity of reason to penetrate and comprehend the dark and strange world in which we live. In his Essay concerning Human Understanding, after surveying the significant problems we confront in trying to make sense of this world, Locke remarked, “From all which it is easy to perceive what a darkness we are involved in, how little it is of Being, and the things that are, that we are capable to know.” Locke’s concern about the restricted scope of human reason was shared by many of his contemporaries. Think, for example, of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1732–34), which situates human life and reflection within a larger cosmic order. Yet we inhabit an unsettling, shadowy world that is not always transparent to us and the rationality of which is not always easy to perceive.
We are, Pope tells us, “born but to die, and reas’ning but to err.” We seem to be suspended somewhere in an indeterminate region between skepticism and certainty. Pope’s famous declaration that humanity should study itself, not God, is often understood to arise from hostility toward religion or to reflect skepticism about theology as a discipline. Yet this amounts to a retrojection of present concerns onto the past. Pope’s point is very different. He wants us to grasp that the limits placed on the human capacity to understand anything—let alone something so perplexing as the mystery of God—force us to focus on studying ourselves instead.
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man.
Pope’s Essay on Man invites us to reflect critically on the aspirations and limits of being human—to acknowledge the difficulties we face in trying to make sense of our universe, precisely because of the limits placed on the human capacity to reason. Pope concedes that this universe appears to be incoherent and ambiguous. Yet he insists that we have to acknowledge the frailty and fallibility of human moral and intellectual capacities in reaching this judgment. Maybe the universe does indeed appear to be imperfect and incoherent—yet perhaps this reflects the limits placed on human perception rather than the way things actually are. The poet John Keats later reworked Pope’s approach in developing his concept of “negative capability”—a willingness to embrace uncertainty, live with mystery, and come to terms with the inevitability of ambiguity.
Life seems chaotic and purposeless to us, precisely because we are immersed within the flux of things and cannot extricate ourselves from it to catch a full glimpse of reality. To use the famous image developed by the American theologian John Alexander Mackay, we long to stand on a balcony looking down on the road of life, which alone might be able to disclose that we have a meaningful place in a coherent universe. Yet our place is on the road, not the balcony. There is no privileged standpoint from which we can observe our world. We cannot stand above the flow of life and history, so we have to make sense of it from within.
The Irish writer John Banville, who won the Man Booker Prize in 2005 for his novel The Sea, is unquestionably worth listening to at this point. His earlier writings explore how many in the early modern period hope to find a certainty of meaning and truth in the natural sciences, seeing these as offering the most reliable source of human knowledge about the world in which we find ourselves. Banville points out how scientists such as Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton tried to discern the hidden order of our universe and live in accordance with it.
Now I think we can understand at least something of what they hoped to achieve. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested that we discover meaning and happiness when we believe that we are thinking and living in accordance with something deeper and greater than ourselves. We need to grasp that “big picture” of the universe and position ourselves within it—and that was what these scientific pioneers tried to do.
Yet, as Banville says, their quest for certainty proved elusive: “I saw a certain kind of pathetic beauty in the obsessive search for a way to be in the world, in the existentialist search for something that would be authentic.” This quest for authenticity was genuine, even passionate—but the intractability of the universe itself proved a frustration to the aspirations of these visionaries.
Gradually, the power of that vision faded, as it was forced to deal with the irreducible fragility and provisionality of human knowledge. Banville points out how the Western cultural investment in the natural sciences as tools of discernment of meaning proved to be misplaced. As its failure became more widely appreciated, Western culture experienced an unsettling transition from Cartesian certainty to Wittgensteinian despair. The hope of finding the Enlightenment’s holy grail, the crystalline clarity of rationalist certainties, gradually gave way to a reluctant realization of the irreducible complexity of the world, which simply could not be expressed in terms of the clear and necessary ideas that the Enlightenment expected and demanded.
Banville chronicles the slow and irreversible transition from rational certainty to existential despair with graceful prose, which perhaps makes it easier for his readers to bear the troubling intellectual significance of what his words convey. For Banville, what one generation took to be rational certainties were found by a later generation to be simply cultural constructions. It’s a problem that some, hankering after the certainties of the bygone Enlightenment, try to suppress, hoping that the rhetoric of what C. S. Lewis called a “glib and shallow rationalism” might distract people from noticing its striking lack of traction on reality.
While those rational certainties nowadays only seem to live on in the curious cultural backwater of the New Atheism, everyone else is trying to figure out how to cope with the predicament in which we find ourselves. Not even the natural sciences, it seems, can deliver secure answers to the deepest questions we would rightly ask ourselves about our meaning, value, and purpose. Yet this does not reduce us to despair; it simply highlights the importance of faith in making judgments that cannot be proved to be true, yet rightly command our intellectual loyalty as trustworthy.
For writers such as Dorothy L. Sayers and C. S. Lewis, Christianity offers a rational view of reality, which invites us to see ourselves and our strange world as they really are, not in terms that we have constructed. For Sayers, Christianity was a discovery of a “big picture”—the way things actually are, not an artificial fabrication of our creative imaginations. Yet if there is indeed such a “big picture,” we seem unable to grasp it fully by ourselves. We need help if we are to see things properly.
This, of course, is a classic theme of Christian theology. The notion of divine revelation is about the disclosure of a view of reality that we did not invent and that tantalizingly lies beyond the capacity of human reason to grasp fully. Revelation is not about the violation or usurpation of human reason but, rather, is a demonstration of its limits and disclosure or intimation of what is believed to lie beyond those limits. Revelation is about the illumination of the landscape of our world, so we can see things more clearly and grasp something of what lies beyond the scope of our vision, if only in part. As the apostle Paul put it, we “see through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12 KJV), securing at best a partial glimpse of what we know to be a grander landscape.
For Christians, this capacity to see things as they really are—rather than as they are glimpsed from the surface of our world—is a gracious gift of God. Our eyes need to be opened, so that our perception of incoherence within the world is seen to arise from our inability to see fully and properly. Truth is about more than logical syllogisms; it is about the meaningful inhabitation of our world. Religious faith is thus not a rebellion against reason but, rather, a principled revolt against the imprisonment of humanity within the cold and limiting walls of a rationalist dogmatism. Human logic may be rationally adequate, but it is also existentially deficient.
Sadly, some of those who boast of being “freethinkers” are simply imprisoned by a defunct eighteenth-century rationalism, perhaps oblivious to the radical changes in our understanding of human rationality that have been forced on us in the last generation. The Enlightenment’s appeal to the authority of reason as the ultimate arbiter of reality ends up being trapped in circular forms of argument. Some assert that reason itself can demonstrate its own authority. To its critics, however, this is simply a circular and parasitical argument that both assumes and depends on its own conclusions. Reason judges reason. Yet if there were a flaw in human rational processes, reason itself would not be able to disclose this. We might find ourselves locked into unreliable patterns of thought, without any means of escape.
The recent rise of postmodernity is not really a symptom of cultural irrationalism, as critics such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins suggest. Rather, it is a principled protest against the intellectual authoritarianism of rationalism and the inadequacy of its foundations. Perhaps we have only recently come to realize the deficiencies of an approach to life that is determined—as opposed to merely being informed—by reason. Reason is a wonderful critical tool; but it is an unreliable foundation for truth. It is too shallow to meet our existential needs on the one hand or to cope with the complexity of our universe on the other.
That’s why the idea of “mystery” is so important, both scientifically and theologically. The great physicist Werner Heisenberg argued that scientific thinking “always hovers over a bottomless depth.” We are confronted with the “impenetrable darkness” of the universe and forced to face up to our acute difficulties as we struggle to find a language that is adequate to engage and represent this opaque world. Those of us who have studied quantum theory know how it was forced to develop its own distinct rationality to cope with our fuzzy world, which calls into question inadequate commonsense conceptions of what is reasonable, shaped by our limiting experience of reality. Human rationality must adapt to the structures of the universe rather than prejudge what they ought to look like on the basis of some naive predetermined notion of what is reasonable.
Similarly, Christian theology recognizes that it is utterly impossible to represent or describe God adequately using human language. Christian theology uses the term “mystery” to refer to the vastness of God, in that human images and words falter—if they do not break down completely—as they try to depict God fully and faithfully. A mystery is not something that is contradicted by reason but something that exceeds reason’s capacity to discern and describe. To speak of some aspect of the natural world or of God as a mystery is not to try to shut down the human reflective process, but to stimulate it—by opening the mind to an intellectual vision that is simply too deep and broad to be fully apprehended by our limited human capacity to see, and challenging us to do our best to represent it within these limits.
Our universe is a mystery—something with so many impenetrable and uncomprehended dimensions that our minds struggle to take it in. We can only cope with such a mystery either by filtering out what little we can grasp and hoping that the rest is unimportant, or by slimming it down to what our limited minds can accommodate and, thus, simply reducing it to the rationally manageable. Yet both of these well-intentioned strategies end up distorting and disfiguring the greater reality we are trying to engage.
For many, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity represents a classic instance of the irrationality of faith. Augustine of Hippo offered us one of the finest accounts of the limits of our ability as human beings to capture God in slick little slogans. “If you think you have grasped God, it is not God who you have grasped.” Si enim comprehendis non est Deus: if you can get your mind around it, it’s not God. It’s something else that you might incorrectly think is God but, in fact, is something you have created and invented and labeled as God.
Anything that we can grasp fully and completely simply cannot be God, precisely because it would be so limited and impoverished. It is easy to create God in our own likeness—a self-serving human invention that may bear some passing similarity to God but actually falls far short of the glory and majesty of the God that stands at the heart of the Christian disclosure. In the end, our words are just not good enough to cope with the conceptual majesty of God, so splendidly expressed in the theological notion of glory. God simply overwhelms our mental capacities. The vastness of the reality that we inhabit simply cannot be grasped in anything other than a partial and limited manner by the human mind.
This university sermon today is set within the context of Christian worship. Perhaps the framework I have presented in this sermon may help us to understand the creative tension that exists within the Christian life between theology on the one hand and worship on the other. This tension reflects—and paradoxically celebrates—the fact that something of God can be grasped, however inadequately, by the human mind, hence leading to theology; at the same time it recognizes that so much of God still remains beyond the human capacity to understand, and hence leads to worship, in the sense of acknowledging that the greatness and majesty of God ultimately eludes verbal analysis and is therefore best expressed in the language and actions of praise and adoration.
The theme of darkness has hovered over this sermon, not because I am a creature of the night who relishes the shadowlands, but because we inhabit a world in which we can only see things in part. Locke and Heisenberg, in their different ways, call upon us to recognize the limits of our situation. Yet there is hope: the light shines in the darkness, which cannot overwhelm it. The rich vision of reality that stands at the heart of the Christian faith both captures our imagination and nourishes our mind. The Christian gospel allows us to make sense of our world and inhabit it meaningfully, while at the same time giving us a vision of hope for the greater reality that we believe awaits us in the New Jerusalem. It is, I trust, a fitting thought for us as we prepare to move into the season of Advent and focus on the Christian hope.
A university sermon preached before the University of Oxford at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, on November 6, 2016.